Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

Inhalt
Invited Paper.- 1 Starfield information and visualization with interactive smooth zooming.- One Querying by Content.- 2 Querying multimedia data from multiple repositories by content: the Garlic Project.- 3 Representing concave objects using virtual images.- 4 Feature-index-based similar shape retrieval.- Two Visual Languages Assessment.- 5 Diagrammatic vs textual query languages: a comparative experiment.- 6 Flexibility of visual languages for data manipulation.- 7 Design perspectives in visualising complex information.- Three Video Databases.- 8 Feature based digital video indexing.- 9 Dynamic object clustering for video database manipulations.- 10 Iconic retrieval by contents from databases of cardiological sequences.- Panel.- 11 Data models, visual representations, metaphors: how to solve the puzzle?.- Four Visualization.- 12 The design of 3D metaphors for database visualization.- 13 Issues in visualizing large databases.- 14 Visualization of rule behaviour in active databases.- Five GIS.- 15 Visual map algebra: a direct-manipulation user interface for GIS.- 16 Manipulations of graphs with a visual query language: application to a geographical information system.- 17 GISQL a query language interpreter for geographical information systems.- Six Visual Programming.- 18 Database object display definition and management with Moggetto.- 19 Visual construction of highly interactive applications.- 20 The integration of functional and visual programming for the development of a knowledge based interface.- Seven Text and Hypermedia.- 21 Visual interface for textual information retrieval systems.- 22 An ODA/Dexter hyperdocument system with automated link definition.- 23 Navigation and coordination primitives for multidimensional visual browsers.- Eight Data Models and Data Structures.- 24 An automatic visual database interface.- 25 NQS a graphical query system for data models with binary relationship types.- 26 Query processing methods for connectivity search in visual databases using R+-tree.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.